Roy Porter, Requiescat in Pace

[Dave Monroe]

>From W.F. Bynum, "Roy Porter," The Guardian, Tuesday,
March 5th, 2002 ...

A man of prodigious energy - needing only a few hours'
sleep a night - the eminent historian and broadcaster
Roy Porter, who has died aged 55, seemed to write
faster than many people read, and the steady stream of
books became an avalanche once he had mastered the
computer.
 
Roy took his historical scholarship seriously - from
1993 until last year, he was professor of the social
history of medicine at the Wellcome Institute for the
History of Medicine - but he became something of a
populist as he grew older. His style became more
dazzling and bemusing as his brilliant command of
language and playfulness led to distinctly Porterian
turns of phrase. He moved easily between social,
medical and psychiatric history, and was never better
than when describing eccentricity and extremes of
temperament. 

Within medical history, he pioneered the now
fashionable concern with patients (instead of
doctors), and his books on 18th-century medical
history (two of them written with his third wife,
Dorothy Porter) rescued this century from the clutches
of historians blind to its medical richness. He also
wrote widely on the history of psychiatry and its
patients, and on sex and the history of the body....

http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,662000,00.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,661958,00.html

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